Panel Lays Out the Case for Cybersecurity Regulation Harmonization
The Government Accountability Office’s latest technology report, Cybersecurity Regulations: Industry Perspectives on the Impact, Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities of Harmonization (GAO-25-108436), distills candid remarks from a dozen private-sector leaders who gathered in late May 2025 to assess how well Washington is synchronizing the nation’s patchwork of cyber rules. Selected from twelve critical-infrastructure sectors, the panelists spoke under confidentiality to maximize candor, yet clear themes emerged about life on the front line of compliance.
Participants agreed that the sheer volume of overlapping mandates—more than a dozen in some sectors—now drains money, time, and talent away from true security work. Audits may arrive from up to seven different agencies, each requesting the same evidence in slightly different formats, forcing firms to hire armies of compliance staff and outside assessors. As one executive put it, every dollar “spent on compliance would better be spent on cybersecurity,” a refrain the GAO quotes repeatedly. Some companies estimate that half of their cyber teams’ hours are consumed simply mapping one regulator’s definitions to another’s reporting portal, leaving less time to hunt real threats.
Small businesses feel this burden most acutely: they must meet the same federal standards as multinational peers but without comparable compliance budgets or in-house lawyers. Meanwhile, global firms wrestle with contradictions between U.S. rules and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, exacerbating the complexity. The result, panelists warned, is a cyber-risk tax that diverts scarce resources away from defenses and toward paperwork.
When GAO probed for signs of improvement, the verdict was blunt: “We are no closer today than we were ten years ago on creating a solution for harmonization.” Limited progress is visible in the growing use of common terminology and frameworks such as NIST CSF 2.0, but gaps persist because regulators still write bespoke definitions and incident thresholds that do not translate across sectors. Panelists emphasized that, without a single federal authority empowered to impose reciprocity among agencies, duplication will remain the norm.
GAO then catalogues the structural obstacles that keep harmonization elusive. Regulators often develop sector-specific jargon instead of borrowing from widely adopted standards, leaving companies to reconcile a Babel of terms. Agencies also lack incentives—and, at times, the cyber-savvy workforce—to share data or accept each other’s assessments, causing firms to submit the same incident report multiple times while simultaneously trying to contain the breach.
Yet optimism surfaced around CIRCIA, the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022. If the Department of Homeland Security finalizes its 2026 implementing rule with an eye toward reciprocity, panelists believe it could become the nucleus for a single, government-wide incident-reporting pipeline. In the near term, they urged policymakers to use CIRCIA as a template and to reauthorize the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act to protect companies that share threat data.
Long-range solutions, the group argued, will require bolder steps: designate a lead federal entity with authority over cyber regulation; create a unified reporting portal that lets a company “tell Washington once”; and shift regulations toward performance-based, threat-informed standards aligned with NIST so compliance efforts actually reduce risk. Several also floated liability protections or “safe-harbor” incentives to reward firms that adopt harmonized best practices, thereby leveling the playing field against competitors that underinvest in security.
GAO’s director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity, David Hinchman, and his analyst team frame these insights not as policy prescriptions but as a factual snapshot of industry sentiment on July 30 2025. Their report underscores a central tension: cybersecurity threats demand speed and unity, yet the federal rulebook still speaks with many voices. Whether Congress and the executive branch can translate this industry plea into coherent action will determine whether future cyber budgets buy protection or paperwork.
Disclaimer: This blog post provides a good-faith narrative summary of GAO-25-108436, Cybersecurity Regulations: Industry Perspectives on the Impact, Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities of Harmonization, dated July 30 2025, by David Hinchman et al. It is offered for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or professional advice. Readers should consult the original GAO publication for complete accuracy.